Tim has 30+ years of public relations and marketing experience. Today, his agency, UPRAISE Marketing and Public Relations serves a wide range of clients, earning outsized results.

interesting report a couple of weeks ago, authored by Francis Brown of consulting firm Stach & Liu, which focused on hackers using search engines to seek out vulnerabilities in organizations’ IT environments.

Talented IT teams regularly beat themselves up over technical debt and have built comprehensive plans to effectively manage and minimize its effects. Prodded by Larry Dignan in a recent post, just for today, take a break and instead look at the technical debt practices of enterprise software vendors.

I came across that old phrase, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” the other day, in the context of marriage. Why should people marry when they can just live together? Well, you can imagine I came across a lot of opinions I won’t go into here.

An article by Naomi Bloom popped up, using the phrase in a technology context. She noted that vendors of traditional licensed/on-premise enterprise software had served themselves very well by forcing customers to buy both the apps as well as owning the data center and its operations, application management, upgrades, human resources, and more. This has provided traditional vendors considerable financial security and market power.

Imagine this scenario: your spouse, child or loved one is critically ill and is transferred from hospital to hospital, in search of that “House-like” diagnosis that will bring a cure, or at least remission. Think about the physical pain, the mental anguish, the uncertainty.

One of the oldest conversations on record is the discussion of how to measure effective software development. One of the most used, most abused and least understood metric is “velocity.” Think Corvettes versus Volkswagens.

Just to keep terms straight, velocity is the sum of the estimates of delivered/accepted features per iteration. Velocity can be measured in the same units as feature estimates, whether this is story points, days, ideal days or hours.

Let’s face it, monopolies are evil. They distort markets, result in higher prices and stifle innovation. This is true whether the monopoly controls an industry, a sport or a way of thinking. John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil created artificially high prices until broken up, the NFL resisted updating its rules until the upstart AFL emerged and the Catholic Church’s control over people’s beliefs and lifestyles resulted in the Dark Ages.